These courses offer students current maps of the field as well as in-depth study of diverse contemporary experimental poetries, as connected to critical issues and practices in other disciplines.
These courses investigate the history and textual-critical issues pertaining to the codex and related forms, editing and canon formation, and alternative modes of printing and distribution, as well as the non-print media of poetry (such as recorded sound or visual works).
These courses provide clearly delineated historical contexts for contemporary innovative practices, and include study of particular constellations of writers as well as single authors.
These courses explore untapped or under-investigated areas of current innovation, to speculate on poetries yet to come and to think from the outer edge of the thinkable.
These courses offer non-Eurocentric studies of the world history of poetics, focusing on non-Western cultures and practices from the ancient to the contemporary.
Ming-Qian Ma
What is an anagram and where does it occur in the architectonics of language? How do we approach a printed poem once it gets installed in a museum, as is the case with Poetry Plastique, or in a specific site, as is exemplified by Fiona Templeton’s Cells of Release? What happens when we move from Robert Smithson’s “non-site” to “site,” and from his earth sculpture “The Spiral Jetty” to Eduardo Kac’s DNA molecular art of Genesis? What do we have to do when reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s 800-page-plus Day along side of Rae Armantrout’s minimalist poems? What is required of us when language’s speed of delivery becomes slowed down? What does it mean when a poem is considered as “unreadable” or “unintelligible”? How do we perceive an artist’s autonomy and individual uniqueness in the all-encompassing networks of technological production and dissemination? ….
This seminar will explore the above poetic phenomena and theorize their implications as well as ramifications through the issue of scale. Underlying, either explicitly or implicitly, the contemporary exploratory poetry and its experimental practices, the concept of scale has lately become one of the focal points of speculative rethinking, not only brought to the forefront of current critical inquiries in diverse disciplines but also radically broadened by the recent advents of new technologies and extended by various branches of the newly emerged philosophy of the non-human. The questions this seminar will engage include, among many others, what is scale and what is its function? Why does size matter (Bonner)? What are the “scale effects” (Clark)? How is scale reconfigured by new technologies and new philosophical speculations, and what are the concomitant consequences? What does it entail when scale is changed? What is the significance of scalar metamorphoses in terms of our perceptual, conceptual, epistemological, and “enactive capacities” (Bak and Reynolds)? ….
